The Edge
Suicide.
The word presses into the air, heavy and cold, folding the room in half. People stiffen when they hear it. Their eyes drop, their hands fidget, their bodies recoiling as if the sound itself might latch onto them. No one wants to touch it, to look at it too closely. But I have felt it. I have known it. I have let it curl around my chest, sink into my lungs, slip into my bones until every heartbeat is labor and every breath feels borrowed. It is patient. It waits in the quiet. It waits in the hum of a refrigerator, the flicker of a streetlight, the ordinary sounds of a house where no one notices the shadow that has come to stay.
People do not understand. They say it is selfish. They say it is attention-seeking. They have never felt the weight that wraps around your chest, that tightens around your throat, that makes even standing upright impossible. They have never felt the world collapse inward while it continues on outside, laughing, talking, eating, celebrating. They have never felt the silence that fills a room when you are suffocating in it, when even your own heartbeat becomes distant and muffled.
It is not a choice. I never chose to carry it, any more than someone chooses cancer eating at their body. It comes slow, like a spark in the pit of the stomach. Then it spreads, curling its way into every corner of thought. Every idea, every hope, every fragment of energy is wrapped in its pressure. Your lungs refuse to expand. Your thoughts stick together like molasses. The voice comes next, whispering at first, then screaming. There is only one way out.
I have survived. Not once, not twice, but again and again. And you might think surviving means the end. But it does not. The memory follows you. It crouches in the corner of your mind, watching, waiting, reminding you of how thin the line is between staying and leaving. The line is almost invisible. It vibrates beneath every decision, every action, every quiet moment when you are alone with your own body. You feel it even in sunlight, even in laughter, even when you are trying to breathe.
The world insists on sanitizing this. We call it a voluntary act. We call it committing. We speak of it in polite, hushed terms, as if naming it carefully will keep it from spreading. But the truth is brutal. It happens when the darkness rises higher than any light, when life presses in from all sides and there is no air left in the room. When you are hollow and the walls feel like they are closing in and you are utterly alone.
And yet I am here. I do not know why, but I am.
I remember the night I first came close to leaving. The pills were in my hand. The motel room smelled like stale cigarettes and damp carpet, the neon VACANCY sign outside flickering with a pulse that felt almost alive. The bed sagged beneath me, carrying the weight of years it had forgotten to bear. I remember staring at the ceiling, the hum of the heater like a distant river. My hands shook as I lined up the bottles, counting the tablets with a precision I could not explain. Everything inside me had narrowed into a single focus, a sharp, relentless need to escape. And then something happened that I cannot fully articulate. Not courage, not fear, but a fragile, flickering presence of awareness. I set the pills aside. I breathed. And for a moment, I thought perhaps there is some margin left between death and life.
Survival has a strange texture. It is not a victory, not really. It is a ledger of quiet resistances. It is forcing your body upright when every part of you wants to collapse. It is opening your eyes in the morning when you have been up all night staring at the ceiling, listening to your own mind rattle against itself. It is brushing your teeth, making coffee, feeding the cat, standing in the kitchen and wondering if breathing will ever feel easy again. Survival is noticing that you are still here and pretending for just a moment that might be enough.
The first time I truly understood the weight of my own mind, I was sixteen. I had been assaulted, my body violated, my sense of self scattered across a world that did not care. The world continued as if nothing had happened while I could barely hold my own thoughts together. Every night, the darkness in my room whispered to me, coaxing me toward an escape that promised release from a body that no longer felt like mine. I learned early how convincing it could be. I learned early how seductive the idea of disappearing felt. And yet, some invisible force—a mixture of stubbornness, fear, and perhaps the faintest trace of hope—kept me breathing.
Art has been my tether. Words, ink, the act of writing when no one is watching, when the pages cannot judge, when the pen does not demand applause. Painting has saved me in its own way, though it always felt like a shield. The public sees the final work, the image, the abstraction. But the act of creation—the moving of hand and heart in tandem, the giving of self without reservation—has been my lifeline. It is the only place where I could inhabit myself without fear, where the chaos of my mind could translate into something tangible, something comprehensible.
Writing is different. Writing exposes the raw interior. It does not let you hide behind abstraction, behind color or texture. Words ask for truth. Words demand presence. Words require that you inhabit yourself fully, with all your fear, all your longing, all your unformed thoughts spilling out in ink that cannot be smoothed over. Writing forces me to confront the suffocating dark and name it, to trace its outline until I can see the edges and understand that I am still alive in the spaces between them.
I remember the hospital room where I nearly did not return to life. The machines hummed, and the white walls glowed with a sterile, lifeless light. Tubes and wires tethered me to survival I did not want to claim. Every touch from a nurse, every note from a doctor, was both foreign and intimate, a reminder that I was caught between the world and something unrecognizable inside myself. I was flesh, bone, and machine. I was a mind that had wanted to disappear. I was tethered to the planet, and yet I did not want to be.
Memory is a double-edged thing. It slices through the present with clarity and terror. I can remember moments of acute despair, the nights when my pulse felt too loud and the darkness too complete. I can remember the mornings when the world continued outside my window and I felt like I had been erased from it. And I can remember the first time I realized that survival itself carries meaning. Not the grand meaning of achievement or applause, but the intimate, stubborn meaning of being here to witness another sunrise, to make another cup of coffee, to write another word.
The world cannot sanitize the truth of suicide. The language of politeness, the euphemisms, the whispered warnings do nothing to capture the texture of its terror, its intimacy, its persistence. Those who have not lived it cannot grasp it. They cannot know the quiet horror of a mind that twists against itself or the way the body can betray you while your desire to escape rises in waves. It is the kind of experience that cannot be fully conveyed.
And yet, the act of witnessing oneself survive is a form of revelation. It is an awakening to the fragility and persistence of life. It is an insistence that every small act of care, every conscious breath, every effort to inhabit the body and mind fully, is a defiance. It is a refusal to vanish, a quiet assertion that existence matters, even when it feels impossible.
Art, writing, living—they converge in this space. They provide proof of endurance, a record of survival, a tether for others who walk close to the edge. Each journal I have ever written, each painting I have ever made, each word set down on a page, is a testament to the fact that life, while brutal and fraught with peril, is still ours to claim. The act of creating, of speaking, of writing our stories, is a way to trace the line between existence and disappearance. It is a map, a memorial, a lifeline.
I write this because the margins are fragile, and because someone reading these words might feel that same pressure, that same suffocating weight, that same call of the void. And they need to know that survival, though tenuous and uneven, is possible. Survival is not a tidy narrative. It is not always linear. It is jagged, bloody, persistent. It is breathing when every part of you wants to disappear. It is opening your eyes, again and again, when the world seems determined to crush them shut.
I am still here. I cannot explain why. But I am still here. I write these words as proof. I write them as a map. I write them as an offering to the parts of myself and others that have trembled at the edge. To show that survival is not just possible. It is active, deliberate, and necessary. It is the act of refusing disappearance, of tracing each line of the body, each pulse of the mind, and claiming it as yours. It is creating art when the world has no use for it, it is telling stories when no one listens, it is breathing when the air feels heavy with despair.
We need to talk about this. Not politely, not in whispers, not behind closed doors. We need to name it, trace it, sit with it, witness it. We need to give it language that is not sanitized, not comfortable, not abstract. We need to show its true form so it can be seen, so it can be confronted, so it can be endured. Silence and shame are the things that kill. Naming it, witnessing it, claiming it, surviving it—these are the acts that save.
And in the quiet of my own survival, in the act of writing and remembering, I have found fragments of beauty. Fragile, uneven, pulsing with imperfection, but unmistakably alive. The world still exists. Life still presses forward. Breathing is still possible. And in that simple persistence, there is meaning, there is connection, there is hope.
This is the line I walk every day. Between darkness and light, disappearance and presence, despair and endurance. This is what survival looks like when it is raw, unflinching, and honest. And it is enough.
